There are plenty of countries that do caps of various kinds. Just because your particular ISP in your particular country doesn't don't assume that there aren't others that do it.

It is perfectly possible to have a reasonable cap. If you find that you use a reasonable amount of your bandwidth cap, but still have a good bit left over, that is just about right. It isn't more than you could ever use, but it is more than you do use under normal usage, with some space for unexpected overages.

Wether they want to see opinions they agree with or not is up to them; if they up moderate both things they agree with and those they don't they'll get connected to people who moderate the same way.

Trying to force people to moderate without bias doesn't work very well, a significant portion will always downmod things they disagree with and things like metamoderation only affect the most excessive raters. This way you limit the damage so the subjective moderations only affect those who want it to affect them.

Perhaps you will end up with most discussions containing people who barely ever even see eachother. Much like real life. Or networks of groups who like having meaningful conversations will form. But which one you'd be part of would depend upon your preferences, not on what random people you have nothing in common with think about a specific conversation.

And, perhaps, just perhaps, there'd be a bit less of screaming for censorship anytime anyone gets offended by idiots if the easily offended got separated from the rest.

Opinions vary wildly on what is good moderation so personally I think a social moderation system would be the ultimate in moderation. Make it exceptionally easy to rate comments, then create a connection network where users get connected to and trust each others moderation based on how similarly they rated various comments.

You'll have an incentive to moderate and you bypass the entire problem of trying to objectively rate comments; each user gets to see what they prefer. Don't want the utter crap deleted? Then don't downmod it and you'll start trusting the moderation of others who enjoy the utter crap. Hate racist comments and don't want to see them at all? Eventually you'll build up enough connections to people who always downmod them to have them rapidly filtered out.

The difficult part will be building enough of a user base that most people get decent amounts of close matches.

There are plenty of groups that want you to use torrent to distribute their stuff, and some that require it. MMOs have gotten to like to use torrents for their patches, since they are often very large. Their autopatcher uses torrents to accelerate things, and you don't have a choice in the matter. They WANT you to help redistribute their stuff, takes the load off their servers.

If the copyright holder is the one who created, posted, and seeded, the torrent, well then they are implicitly giving permission.

Same shit as a company posting things on their website. They can't go and post something for download, but then claim you didn't have permission to download it.

Self driving is the single feature that would ever get me to shell out for a new car. Nothing like having your own car drive you home after a couple of beers after work.

Ultimately, the huge capacity to save lives and the economic advantages of self-driving cars and trucks are going to drive this step very fast. Tens of thousands of lives every year, hundreds of thousands of injuries, tens to hundreds of billions in insurance costs, tens to hundreds of billions in savings on transportation, etc. In the face of the possible gains I think the regulatory aspects will get resolved faster than most people think.

A popular thing here on /. which the original poster did is to turn any story either about China doing something bad, or the US doing something bad in to a "Oh look at how bad the US is, they can't say anything to China!" or "OMG the US is worth than China/Russia, they are more free!" Or equally stupid shit like that.

In no way is China relevant to this. What's more, the idea that only if a nation is perfect that it could level any criticism at another is completely ludicrous.

It is just spin, just crap to try and hate on the US and allies for no particular reason. So the GP had a good point: China does some pretty bad shit, things that even the imperfect countries that are the UK and US might have an issue with.

If people want discussions of the problems with western governments to stay on topic, something I think is a good idea, then the first step is to stop dragging in China et al at every opportunity. What the US, UK, etc do is good or bad, right or wrong, regardless of what they say to China, regardless of how they compare to China, etc.

If you want to start playing the "compare and contrast" game, well then don't be surprised when others come back in kind.

Ya I have to day at my work at least the Linux servers are certainly NOT easier than the Windows servers to administer. The Linux lead spends a lot of time dicking around in the command line messing with scripts and settings to get everything working and managed nice. It works, don't get me wrong, we have a functional setup and process, but this idea that it is somehow easy and magic is false and speaks to a lack of experience.

When I see someone who proposes something like "replace Windoze (lol I totally stuck it to Microsoft misspelling their software!) with Linux" as a magic fix for needing less people in a big enterprise to me it says this is someone who has installed Linux on their desktop, and maybe a personal web server, and somehow thinks that means they know all about enterprise administration. They figure what is true for them must be true for 50,000 systems. I mean after all, the fact that they had Windows crash on them one time clearly means it is unstable and unsupportable!

Windows does a lot right for the enterprise. Their authentication service is really good. AD really does the trick for managing a large collection of systems and users. We use it as the backend for everything, Windows, Linux and Mac and yes, we've tried it other ways (we used to do Sun LDAP and IDsync as the backend, what a nightmare to make work). Anyone who says Microsoft doesn't have good tools for large scale management is really just saying they don't have experience in a large scale setting with Windows and other OSes.

Also that suggestion is funny, given that the NSA likes and uses Linux for a number of things. You might want to look up who gave us SELinux (hint: the NSA). Ever wonder why it has such paranoid, granular, control if you want it? That's why.

New Intel drives do, as they use the Sandforce chipset. However Samsung drives don't. Samsung makes their own controller, and they don't mess with compression. All writes are equal.

Also 14TB sounds a little low for a write limit. MLC drives, as the XM25 was, are generally spec'd at 3000-5000 P/E cycles. Actually should be higher since that is the spec for 20nm class flash and the XM25 was 50nm flash. Even assuming 1000, and assuming a write amplification factor of 3 (it usually won't be near that high) you are talking 52TB if the drive has no internal overprovisioning, which it probably does.

As an example, AnandTech tested a Samsung 840 TLC drive. The 250GB drive was able to take about 266TB of incompressible data, which translates to a bit more than 1000 P/E cycles.

If you have a high write workload, their MLC drives aren't that much. A 512GB 840 Pro drive will run you like $450. That should get you somewhere in the realm of 1.5PB of writes before it fails, maybe more.

Most UPSes these days are line-interactive. That means they are not doing any conversion during normal operation. The line power is directly hooked to the output. They just watch the line level. If the power drops below their threshold, they then activate their inverter and start providing power. So while their electronics do use a bit being on, it is very little. The cost isn't in operation, it is in purchasing the device and in replacing the batteries.

That aside SSDs don't have problems with it (it was a firmware bug, Samsung fixed it) and if your data is important, you probably don't want to rely on your journal to make sure it is intact. When you get in to real high end, reliable, storage, power backup is a big thing. Our Equallogic has dual full redundant power supplies on all units, which they wanted plugged in to separate circuits (one is line only, one is generator backed), redundant controllers, and the NAS has internal batteries backing the cache in case of power failure, ones that last quite awhile.

There's a big difference between "a journal that means the filesystem isn't in an inconsistent state (usually)" and "a setup where one doesn't lose any data."

If you are concerned about efficiency costing you money in your computers (it likely costs less than you think) then your PSU is the place to look. If you didn't specifically buy a good one, it is probably 80% or less efficient. You can get them a bit above 90% if you try, and match them to the load.

You'd need a better network to have any use. A modern 7200rpm drive is usually around the speed of a 1gbit link, sometimes faster, sometimes slower depending on the workload. Get a RAID going and you can generally out-do the bandwidth nearly all the time.

SSDs are WAY faster. They can slam a 6gbit SATA/SAS link, and can do so with nearly any workload. So you RAID them and you are talking even more bandwidth. You'd need a 10gig network to be able to see the performance benefits from them. Not that you can't have that in your house, but you don't because it is damn expensive. Lacking that, you'll notice very little improvement over magnetic drives.

Also to be technically correct (the best kind of correct) you probably don't have a SAN in your home. A SAN is a separate network, purely for storage devices, not connected to your LAN. It is a FC/FCoE/iSCSI/whatever backend that your storage devices talk on, and then there's a different network that your clients use to talk to the storage server (which is on both networks).

Usually, once you have your computer set up with your programs, you don't write a ton of data. A few MB per day or so. Samsung drives come with a little utility so you can monitor it.

As a sample data point I reinstalled my system back at the end of March. I keep my OS, apps, games, and user data all on an SSD. I have an HDD just for media and the like (it is a 512GB drive). I play a lot of games and install them pretty freely. In that time, I've written 1.54TB to my drive. So around 11GB per day averaged out, though realistically about 500GB of that was done the first day, since I installed the system, put the apps on, then changed my mind with regards to UEFI boot, and reinstalled the system.

I think some people believe that since they have a lot of data, they must write a lot and thus the write limit would be problematic. However the data you have is usually largely static. Your delta is fairly small and thus not that problematic to flash.

So while I wouldn't want to use TLC flash drives in a backup system or something, there really isn't an issue in a desktop. If you do have an atypical situation where you have very write intensive workloads, well you can always have a magnetic (or SLC flash) secondary disk for them. But for desktop usage, you just aren't going to write that much to your disk.

Well, unless you actually act on the tool and treat those 150085 people as terrorists, in which case 10% of them will actually become terrorists and each will drag at least one other person into it through loyalty and/or family ties. In which case you now have more than 30k terrorists of which only half is believed to possibly be a terrorist.

Not a solution, no, but part of the problem.

According to TFA and the blog post it's server side encryption. Which, of course, does absolutely nothing for security as the NSA will just get the data before it's encrypted.

If you don't want your data read you encrypt it before sending it to someone else.

States want to give less money to state schools. Well, when there's less coming in from taxes they can either cut services, or raise prices. "Do more with less," is a line from uninformed PHBs and politicians, it just doesn't work that way. Many universities have done both, cut some services, and raised rates.